I’ve always felt that not having a feed from Wisconsin Kubb and USA Kubb were huge, huge gaps on the Planet Kubb feed. I even tried a couple of times to screen scrape the HTML off of those sites, but it proved too hard. This fills one of those huge holes. Yeah!

Hey @chad-b! The flow of the Planet Kubb feed is all about RSS. Many website content management systems create RSS — almost all blog packages do. Without RSS there isn’t a feed for me to pull into Planet Kubb. Any way that you can add RSS will allow me to add your new updates to the feed.

WordPress will output RSS formats all over the place. If you use WordPress to host it I know that I can get a feed, provided you have posts published and not just pages.

I would love to add Chippewa Valley to the list as well, however it looks like you only have a Facebook page right now? Facebook doesn’t reliably provide RSS output, and the “status update” format of Facebook doesn’t work well in the Planet Kubb World feed.

If you put up a site for the league, use something like WordPress so that it provides an RSS feed and I will put it in right away.

Another option is to use the new Planet Kubb Network option and host a league site using that. Let me know if that is interesting to you.

I reached out to the guys that run the Kubbspel website to ask if they could make an RSS feed available for their News items. They run their site using Drupal so I thought it might be easy. Two days later Tim from Kubbspel sent me an RSS feed link. Kubbspel is now syndicated onto Planet Kubb as well!

By the way, if your ever curious what Planet Kubb is reading from you can directly pull the OPML file of all of the feeds.

I just added Basel City Kubb‘s website to the Planet Kubb feed. This is the first non-US feed in the Planet Kubb site. I’ve been hunting for more RSS/Atom syndicated websites and was excited to find this one.

If the team page doesn’t exist for a team the red link will show the form to create a team entry.

That is it for now. Obviously a Bracket8 and Bracket32 would be simple modifications of this one. It would also be pretty simple to allow the results to be coded in (e.g., 2-1, 2-0, 1-2, etc). The nice thing from this is that teams could get win and loss stats even if their games are not scored completely using the scoring system. I really like the idea of getting basic win-loss stats from brackets and then detailed games stats from the scoresheets which will be used much less.

Just to show what was possible, I modified the Bracket16 template quickly to pull in the Location property for any team from their Team page (if one exists). Team pages were created for all the teams as Nationals this year, so you can see this bracket now has location information for 5 of the 16 teams in this bracket. Pretty cool!

Ask Planet Kubb was down for most of the day today, and a number of other sites I run were also affected but were still available. I’m sure the Planet Kubb Wiki would have rejected any edits attempted today. Since the main Planet Kubb planet feed isn’t dependent on MySQL it was not affected.

The root filesystem on the server that hosts MySQL got full on me. Here is the graph:

It was creeping up on me and at 9:11 am CT today it filled up completely. Ask Planet Kubb started returning a blank page which set off one of my Pingdom alarms.

I’m on vacation in Maine with the family so couldn’t look at it until tonight when we got back from Acadia National Park. I cleared up some space and all is better now. You can see in the graph it is now just over 73% full.

PingdomAlert UP:
Ask Planet Kubb (ask.planetkubb.com) is UP again at 08/20/2012 06:21:18PM, after 10h 15m of downtime.

In fairness to MySQL, almost nothing works well when / is 100% full. :-) I was mildly pleased that mysqld required no special attention when space became available, it just worked. I’m guessing that /tmp being full is what really made it mad, since the databases themselves are on a separate volume.

Those videos and all other videos posted by Americoob will be filtered out of the Planet Kubb feed going forward. If you notice anything on Planet Kubb that looks wrong or shouldn’t be there put a note on Pitch and I’ll see what I can do.

Thanks for the heads up @ringerjr. Looks like that entire YouTube account does nothing other than post those rather dumb videos. Added a filter for that account as well.

These posts tend to show up on my RSS pull of YouTube for “kubb game”. The rest of the YouTube feed is targeting specific user accounts. I’m guessing this type of riff raff is just the challenge of that generic search.

Pitch can get some items with lots and lots of comments and I personally get confused sometimes with all the threading of comments nested inside of other comments. It can get really tricky to follow. I just turned off threaded (nested) comments to see how it looks and I think it is probably easier to follow. Do others agree? Should I leave it off? When it’s off you just comment in line one after the other, you cannot specifically “reply” to an earlier comment like you can with threading. But this feels easier to follow.

Threading being off is definitely easier to know where you are in the discussion, but as expected it’s a bummer to not be able to directly reply to something earlier. Definitely tradeoffs. I could see going either way so would love to know if others drastically like this “flat” setting or “threading” on.

Okay, this might be the right happy medium. Allow threaded (nested) comments, but instead of allowing it 10 deep (confusion!) just allow it 2 deep. That way you can have reply threads but it doesn’t get crazy. Still looking for any feedback though.

Thanks for chiming in! I kinda like the new fake grass background too. Someday I would like to get the Planet Kubb main site, Wiki, Ask Planet Kubb and Pitch all using themes that are clearly aligned with each other. I expect that day is very far off. :-)

All along I’ve wanted to generate aggregated player statistics across multiple games and we finally have the first iteration of that working! Each game now tracks a limited set of individual player statistics and the player pages themselves aggregate all the game data and show it in aggregate. From this we can look at @dobbie‘s player page and see he has a cumulative 72% baton hit ratio. He’s thrown 289 kubbs in the games on the wiki with 33 rethrows. We can look at @ringerjr‘s player page and see his baton percentage is 52.2% with 51 kubbs thrown and 2 rethrows.

OK, this thing works. I don’t want to rain on a parade here. Although I think this system is pretty cool, I wonder what it all means and what are we trying to do and show? This is just a small percentage of games/matches that people have played. Not that it matters at all to me, and we are a dozen kubb freaks tossing stats out at each other, but I think it is pretty misleading. Take Josh F. and Mark B. JF has 175 throws. Mark has 12. JF has throws from a friendly? You should have seen Team Kubboom yesterday morning at 5am at our friendly at Aaron’s house. They were tossing 50 percent from eight meters. If we had videoed that and posted it on YouTube, would that make the stats? Another thing is the whole blaster, clean-up, 8-meter positions. Obviously Dave is good, but it is very misleading to have him be first and Aaron not even on that list? Heck, where is Eric Goplin? Did he stop playing kubb? I guess that goes back to my original question, what are we trying to do with these numbers. Some people have 12 games on their page, some have two or three.

Another question, what does rethrows for an inkastare mean? I bet there were players at the US Championship that never had a rethrow, or very, very seldom, but they were spread out all over creation. Each individual inkast means something. I am not sure a rethrow percentage means much.

Again, I don’t want to rain on parades here. I think it is cool to see what a persons percent was for an individual game or maybe a match, especially if I am able to watch it live or on video. I am just not sure putting them all together and rating people with so many different variables (can you compate hit rates from Loppet to Rockford?, # players on a team, when you throw, round in a tournament, who your inkastare is, etc) says a whole lot.

I like the phrase “rain on a tournament”, instead of “rain on a parade”, I guess.

Perhaps I did not say it the correct way before, and I am not sure which page I should be typing this, but I will just stick with this one, instead of both. I think it comes down to the question of what are we trying to show?

First, I really appreciate everything that everyone is doing.On my end, I have to be honest with myself and realize that I will not have time to enter information, data, etc. Back to the questions at hand, I just look at some statistics as not reality, so I have another analogy, and I guess it comes from my real job. If I am working with a community and we do a community survey, what is needed to be statistically accurate? If we get a return rate of 5%, that is not going to do a whole lot. I guess that is the case for everything. It seems like we are comparing apples and oranges, or we don’t have enough apples, etc. If a person/team plays in the semifinal of a tournament and is videotaped and the other semifinal match is not (say U.S. Championship), I think it is difficult to compare data of say Team Knockerheads and Kubbsicles. In addition, if someone is playing in the U.S. Semifinal, that was their 8th match of the tournament. Taking video of two (or even one) matches of nine, that is really not very accurate. I am not sure what any solution is with this, and perhaps it all comes down to the fact that some people will have a lot more videos than others and we just all accept that this is what we have and we cannot improve on it. ( Where is the video of Sweden’s Sons game against Los Padres in Minneapolis this year? I WANT those stats on there. There is no video, so the person that went something like 9 or 11 at eight meters is not on there. I obviously am joking on the “want” to have it on there, but these are the things that throw it for a loop) I guess it goes back to a simple question and that is, what are we trying to show? If the answer is percentages based on the very limited amount of data we have, then we are hitting it.

I am really hoping to do an article in Kubbnation Magazine about them and PK this next year. I am very curious how they do it, how it works, etc.and how we are moving forward, etc.

The one big thing that I am curious about is this. Do they get overly competitive with this (will we with ours?). Will some not show up at tournaments “just to have fun”, will this limit three-person teams, etc. Again, there are not a whole lot of people looking at this, but this game is going to keep growing, right? What is the future? Myself, I don’t think much will change at tournaments, as it is pretty competitive now and worrying about your hit rate, is the least of ones worries.

Again, a HUGE thanks to everyone working on this. It is amazing and wonderful to have people working on these things. Please do not take anything that I am saying that I do not appreciate it and/or that I am saying that you are doing things correct.

I don’t see video as being totally needed. My hope is that people will just print out some scoresheets and that some spectators will find it fun to score the games. Just like some people do at baseball games. I found that I enjoyed watching the games better when I scored them. I don’t think we’ll have that many recorded games really. But we could have a lot of scored games.

A number of the games there now are video games because we created the data to test the system and make sure things work. The US Nationals games have little to no video except the ones that Knockerheads are in. But they all had scoresheets.

Note the example of Josh F. and Mark B. wasn’t correct data. The Mark B. that had 12 throws was a misspell of his last name. Using the corrected data Mark B. has 95 throws at 72.6% and Josh F. has 176 throws at 72.2%. Mark B. has 10 games and Josh F has 12, which includes 1 friendly (that actually brings his ratings down). I agree friendlies should likely have the box unchecked for including in all stats.

Also Goplin is #11 on that list, right after Chad B.

I think given that this data has never existed before, we’ll need time to figure out what to do with it. And the reality is that there are not even close to enough games in the system to generate high quality stats yet. At this point I’ve just got all the code working for data to flow from games to players and teams. To see what this could look like.

OK, I am on a roll this morning. If this thing is going to be used, are we going to load the stats from all the videos we have? I know the Dallas Oktoberfst Final and Loppet semifinal are out there two. I don’t see Paul Mullen on this list. Plus, Eric and Coles percentages will for sure go up after Game 1 of Dallas, Now, we lost both of those matches, but I was wondering if/when stats from those will be listed. Who enters stats for what?

I agree, the stats system needs “in scope” and “out of scope” games. I suggest taking out friendlies from the stats, and games that are in a tournament setting are good to go. It would be neat to filter just US Nationals games. A quarterfinal game at Nationals could have more “butterflies” than a final game in another tournament.

I think rethrow count (or percent) shows the “aggressiveness” of an inkastare as they attack the corner. I personally like it.

And I think if we say only tournament matches go into stats, that may help with some of the concern.

Secondly, I would love to add as many tournament matches that is out on Youtube. Anyone can add them, and I just haven’t had time yet. Eric A. can add them, but I know that guy is busy too. But it’s fair to say that these stats are not “complete” just yet, and more tournament games need to be added.

I can’t wait for tournament games from Europe start going in. I want to match my stats with the best in the world to get some perspective.

Agreed on the “in/out of scope” concept. Dobbie & I had actually discussed whether or not to add DMK Ranked Ladder matches and I counseled against it. I don’t want us to become a stat generating machine and flood the results here with our games – Planet Kubb stats should (at least in my opinion) be about championship caliber Kubb, not necessarily about any one player or club.

With that in mind, I’d like to suggest that we limit these aggregated stats to:

1) Quarterfinal matches or later at the National Championship
2) Semifinal matches or later at other tournaments
3) Matches where video is online so accuracy of the stats can be independently verified

…on the other hand, perhaps a huge amount of data is a good thing and we SHOULD be recording every possible match? If so, I think we should include an indicator flag to filter on for when we just want to examine the nature of these high-level games.

@Eric – The 2011 Dallas Finals are up, but they aren’t broken down to the player level, mostly because I couldn’t remember the name of the 3rd member of Dead Rabbits (sorry!)

I’m inclined to include any match that’s within a tournament atmosphere – otherwise I don’t think we’ll get the quantity of stats needed for this to be most useful.

Also – note, the Game Form does have a ‘Include in statistics’ checkbox. This supports the DMK Ladder games and friendlies being documented for the purposes of record keeping & personal improvement without impacting the tournament-level stats.

Include in statistics: Include this game in overall calculation of player and team playing statistics.

The code isn’t looking at it yet, but that is specifically for this purpose — put a game that you just want to record for personal purposes (team practice?) but not have it roll up into cumulative statistics.

I noticed that in there, but wasn’t sure of the exact functionality. Do you think it woulod be feasible to change that from “include yes/no” to “include in group A/B/C”?

I think there is still value in aggregating casual games (and presumably over time this would be the largest of the groups and therefore give us our largest sample size), but I think we would want to look at them seperately. Right?

Chris, I like where that’s going, and I can see a tweak that will allow us to do this as well as make it easy to aggregate the stats for a other types of play e.g. the stats for all the DMK Ladder matches.

There is a new graph on the game pages on the Planet Kubb Wiki. This is a graph I had thought about for a while but was having a really hard time figuring out how to program. Now it’s there and I think it is pretty cool. The graph shows Kubbs in Play by turn for a game. It tells a visual story of a Kubb game pretty well. Each chart below is hyperlinked to it’s game page on the wiki.

It can show a slow moving friendly game:

A competitive game with good players that are stuck at a plateau for a number of turns:

A lopsided game that moves pretty slowly:

An embarrasingly short game that blows up in the face of one of the teams:

A championship game that moves along baseline by baseline at a steady clip with a strong battle:

Oh @chrishodges you bait me so. :-) I can definitely get MEAN easy enough from the system. MODE would be a bit harder, I would have to write some code to specifically find it. Mainly I would just build an array of kubbs thrown on each turn (not always equal to kubbs in play, the array I already am tracking) and then do a MEAN and MODE on it.

I just modified the Planet Kubb Wiki Game System to allow for 6 different Inkastares to be active in a game. I haven’t tested it thoroughly. If someone can find a video of a game with everyone throwing kubbs it would be great to put it in the system to test out.

I’ve added some limited game state checking into the Planet Kubb Wiki Game System. There is a list of Games with errors that contains sublists of the types of errors. This is just a start. The game page will display an error message on the turn where it detects a problem as well.

So @dobbie threw 43 kubbs in the game (versus 16 batons!), with 7 rethrows (16% rethrows) and 1 penalty. (aggregating penalty kubb stats and missed king shots is going to be really cool)

Note also the new multifield values (open to a better name, maybe group?). So @dobbie hit 3 doubles, 1 triple, 1 quad and 1 amazing “six”. Now I simply need to be able to aggregate a subset of these stats across games into @dobbie‘s player page.

So the magic is that I’m finally parsing the Notation modifiers in the code. Before it was pretty brain dead, but now the system actually knows the full meaning of “4f2b” or “7i3r2p”. Coming soon I’ll be able to get the game state mechanics working (so that the scoring system knows the state of the pitch at all times). This will also allow the calculation of a baton missing a field or baseline.

I also for the first time have set some game properties… This is where things get really cool. Ready for it? I’m only setting a few basic stats for the games right now, but…

I’m trying out a different theme on Ask Planet Kubb. The one that we’ve been using is the default Question2Answer theme. This one is a little fancier, but curious to know what you all think of it. Share your thoughts with a reply.